After a 13 months development phase and 208 solved tickets, it is my pleasure to announce general availability of Lettuce 5.0. This is a major release coming with several breaking changes and new interesting features and Java 9 compatibility.

The Lettuce driver project graduates after three years now to a top-level project.

It has been three years now since I took over the Lettuce driver project whereas I wanted initially just fix a bug – so to say scratch my own itch I had in an other project. I published Lettuce under biz.paluch.redis:lettuce in June 2014 for the first time, and so I became the maintainer of Lettuce. The original driver was used to be quite popular until its maintenance stopped in 2013 and adoption of my fork began slowly.

Heckenlights is an interactive Christmas lights installation that can be controlled online by just visiting heckenlights.org. Heckenlights consists of over 3000 LED lights that are controlled via MIDI in 12 tracks. Each MIDI note switches the lights on and off.

It all started in 2012 with the idea to control a Relay with MIDI and lead to what it is today. Now, this season is the last one for Heckenlights. It’s been a great fun building Heckenlights and even more stepping outside, opening heckenlights.org on a smartphone and triggering the lights to play.

I’m moving next year to a new house. Heckenlights (originating from Heckenpfad, the address I live) is no more appropriate then.

You can see and operate Heckenlights until Jan 6th, 2017 between 5 pm and 10 pm (CET). After that date, it will be shut down.